Online analytic data drives Globe and Mail’s new print design

I regularly buy the Friday edition of The Globe and Mail. The Real Estate section is always good for a read. Reading about real estate provides one way among many others to reflect upon the events, themes, and spectacles of everyday life.

I would also buy the online subscription, but some of the columnist content persuades me to desist from subscribing. To be more precise, I think Doug Saunders as a columnist makes a lot of sense but there is one columnist whose work I do not support, despite the fact that many Globe readers follow the columnist with interest.

I do appreciate the quality of some of the ongoing straight news articles (that is, articles that seek to focus on evidence-based reporting). The quality stands in contrast to some of the columnist content.

Some years ago, the Globe made a change in its layout.

I thought that the change in layout, which included use of vertical lines to separate paragraphs, did not work all that well.

The newest layout, the one that has been made most recently, involves what appears to the eye as more space between paragraphs. The readability of the text through this and other changes appears to be enhanced. Who cares? I don’t know. I just like to think about such things, which is why I speak out the change in layout.

The Globe’s new layout is discussed in a Dec. 8, 2017 J-Source (The Canadian Journalism Project) article entitled: “Inside The Globe and Mail Print Redesign: The new print edition is heavily informed by the Globe and Mail’s online analytic data.”

This is an interesting article. It’s worth a read. Among other things, I found it of interest to know that the available analytic data indicates that Globe readers love opinion pieces.